Horsed cavalry and horsemanship in general played a tremendous role throughout human history. Our life might have been different without those magnificent animals.

It is indeed extremely ironic that the horsed cavalry ultimately almost reached its perfection when it was finally relegated to history.

After ten centuries of battlefield dominion the cavalry started loosing it's supremacy around the 14th century, when infantry acquired the deadly long bow and the spectacular Swiss pikeman almost eliminated the cavalry from the Western battlefields. Horsed warriors were mostly to be found in the tournaments which were just a sport spectacle detached from military reality. However it was at this point that European riders (finally free from heavy lances and even heavier shields) developed an interest in scientific horsemanship and science of equitation.

This new school of equitation produced a rather bizarre and extremely specialized animal, a "pleasure horse", object of art of manege, a big heavy creature, over bent and slow, which was able to carry men in full plate armor and perform various feats of equine athletics, known as "airs above the ground".

Cavalry

Mexican Cavalry (LOC)

cap_F_Caprilli riding_Itala_jump

Despite its aristocratic esthetics, this kind of horse proved to be extremely useless in real battle and almost no cavalry horses could have enjoyed the specialized training that would make them into a "pleasure horse". Yet, it was the military ideal during the Thirty Years' War.

Nevertheless there was another school of equitation, a more natural and practical one, which was represented by the horseman of Turkey and Eastern Europe which never faced the deadly arrow hail of the English long bow and did not use the heavy full plate armor.

The "Turkey Fashion" consisted of riding with bent knees, using short stirrup-leathers. Turks and Eastern Europeans never gave any conscious thought to for collection or center of gravity; they...

Citation styles:

Horsed cavalry and horsemanship, as it reached its perfection when it was finally relegated to history.. (2002, December 11). In WriteWork.com. Retrieved 01:14, December 10, 2016, from http://www.writework.com/essay/horsed-cavalry-and-horsemanship-reached-its-perfection-fin

WriteWork contributors, "Horsed cavalry and horsemanship, as it reached its perfection when it was finally relegated to history.," WriteWork.com, http://www.writework.com/essay/horsed-cavalry-and-horsemanship-reached-its-perfection-fin (accessed December 10, 2016)

More World History essays:

... power, some 6,000 served with the German armed forces, mainly on the Eastern Front. It did not go unnoticed that the Nobel Prize winner for literature, ... and successful action for its time. It was the first operation in military history which used the combined powers of a nation's army, navy and air ...

... brief period of financial security for the German people but caused unparalleled misery not only to the Jews of Europe but to the greater part of the whole world. The rise of Nazism resulted the darkest chapter in the history of man!

... now understand that the rise of Adolf Hitler marks a violent chapter in German history. He and his Nazi party still have fallowers today, hopefully ... to rid Germany of the Germans and the Communist, and reunite the parts of Europe in which German was spoken. As you can see Hitler already started to ...

... . They were ready to fight but Britain and France helped Hitler, due to his cunning ways. The nation's of Europe just closed there eyes to Hitler's rein of terror, and gave him control of their ally country without a ...

... Eventually Adolf Hitler became it's leader and the rest as they say....is history. 4. HITLER IN POWER While spending time in prison for trying to overthrow the ... be made work for the German people. He thought of blacks as being 'Sub-human'. And Most of all he hated the Jews. So much that in early 1945 ...

7 pages112Dec/19964.5

Students & Profs. say about us:

"Good news: you can turn to other's writing help. WriteWork has over 100,000 sample papers"